M a Late-11Th-Century Copy of Ibn Comes to Us from the Middle East and Central and Inner Asia

ARAMCOWORLD.COMARAMC O W O RLD.C O M MAPS 2020 1441–1442 GREGORIAN HIJRI shows how the Nile emerges from the mythical Mountains of the Moon (now Ethiopia), flows through multiple cataracts and heads north, crosses the equator to pass through the lands of Nubia, Aswan and Beja toward Fustat (medieval Cairo) and finishes in the Nile Delta near Dumyat (Damietta), where it empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Cartographers replicated this depiction of the Nile in various ways in every cartographic manuscript thereafter for centuries. As copies proliferated throughout the medieval Islamic Middle East, this helped establish what became, in effect, the world’s first geographical atlas series. Introduction and calendar captions by KAREN C. PINTO The maps pictured for the months of May and August are by different authors from that “Islamic atlas series” spawned by al-Khwarizmi. May shows the exceptional, three-folio map The richest–surviving heritage of premodern maps of the world of the Mediterranean Sea from a late-11th-century copy of Ibn comes to us from the Middle East and Central and Inner Asia. Hawqal’s Kitab surat al-‘ard. It is the earliest-known copy of the most-mimetic map of the Mediterranean. On it one can see the outlines of the Iberian Peninsula, the Calabrian Peninsula, the Al-Khwarizmi’s rom the Babylonian clay tablet of 600 bce to Katip as the Bahr al-Muhit (Encircling Ocean), which was the most Peloponnese, Constantinople, the map of the Nile Çelebi’s map of Japan drawn in 1732, geographers and basic marker of world maps up through medieval periods. For Bosporus, southeastern Anatolia, became a model cartographers of the Islamic world drew upon Greek, many Muslims, it held the footprint of the throne of God cited in the Levant, Egypt and North F for depicting the Babylonian, Syriac, Sassanian, Indian, Chinese, Turkic and the Qur’an, and it thus became a divine band protecting the Africa; it shows key cities, moun- European knowledge to produce a new, atlas-like genre of world. tains and rivers, along with major river in nearly detailed maps of the world known to them. Until recently With the start of the caliphate and the conquests of the islands of the Mediterranean. every cartographic these maps lay virtually untouched, often ignored on the mid-seventh century, we hear of commanders commissioning August displays two magnif- manuscript for grounds that they are not mimetically accurate representa- maps for military and jizya (poll-tax) purposes, but none of icent maps from Leiden Univer- centuries. tions of lands and seas. these are known to have survived the passage of time. The ear- sity Library’s regally sized and This perspective overlooks the great contribution of Islamic liest-surviving examples of Islamic mapping comes in fresco lavishly illustrated Ms. Or. 3101. One shows the province of maps to the development of the history of cartography. The maps form, from an early-eighth-century Umayyad hammam, the Sindh, with the Indus River running across the land of Buddha show how Muslims perceived the world from the time of the first unesco World Heritage site of Qusayr ‘Amra, a desert retreat and Hind to al-Mansura (present-day Multan) and the land of civilizations until the late Renaissance. The abundance of copies of the prince and future caliph al-Walid ii. Tucked away in the medieval Sindh before emptying into the Indian Ocean. The produced in many places across the Middle East, North Africa, sand and sun of the desert that separates Jordan from Syria and second map depicts the Caspian Sea between the mountains of Anatolia and Central Asia over a millennium testifies to the endur- Iraq, the hammam is capped with a painting of a Ptolemaic star Daylam and Samarkand along what was then the central Silk ing importance of these cartographic visions—as laid out in this fresco. Less well known is the earliest-surviving mimetic depic- Road. These are among the earliest examples of al-Istakhri’s resplendent calendar of images, medieval Islamic and Ottoman. tion of the moon: At the entrance to the hammam, this small Kitab al-masalik wa al-mamalik (Book of routes and realms), Starting in January with the famous Babylonian clay tablet, image precedes the earliest-known European efforts by at least which dates from 1193 ce. Al-Istakhri’s geography went on we see on display the concern seven centuries. February lays out this moon map of Qusayr to become the most heavily copied work of the Islamic atlas The abundance of with mapping the lands of ‘Amra with a special focus on georeferencing, for comparison, a series, with copies surfacing even from mid-18th-century copies produced in Mesopotamia, its empires, contemporary image of the moon. Mughal India. Depicting a highly stylized world of symbolic so many places over rivers and sea. Beyond lie With March we get one of the earliest-known maps depicting shapes, the manuscript was likely produced as a wedding gift mysterious triangular islands for Constance, daughter of Norman King Roger ii. It was 1,000 years testifies the Nile. This is also an example of one of the earliest Islamic shrouded in the mist of maps produced on paper. This one was part of an 11th-century perused by many a European dignitary, including and espe- to the importance myths about Gilgamesh and manuscript copy of al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab surat al-‘ard (Book cially Constance’s son, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick ii. of Islamic-world others. All are encircled by of a picture of the earth) published in English under the title June also reflects Sicilian-Norman influence, this time with cartographic visions. a conjoined ocean, known The Oriental Geography of Ebn Hawqal (1800). Al-Khwarizmi the earliest map depicting medieval Sicily, which was found in the recently discovered 13th-century copy of the Book of Curi- that the 16th-century cartographic illustrator Matrakçı Nasuh osities manuscript. It lays out Sicily’s key cities of Palermo, developed to depict the territorial passages of Ottoman mil- Messina, Syracuse and Trapani so clearly that it could have itary campaigns. Each image from Nasuh—in what could be The Hijri Calendar served as a conqueror’s roadmap. described as the first attempt at 3D—is a visual feast. We chose to In 638 CE, six years after the death of the Prophet Rounding out the symbiotic intellectual relations of Muslims show Nasuh’s image of Baghdad—its earliest-extant city view. Muhammad, Islam’s second caliph, ‘Umar, rec- and Christian Normans in Sicily, September shows the work of November depicts the legendary portolan chart map frag- ognized the necessity of a calendar to govern the Arab cartographer best known in the West, al-Sharif al-Din ment credited to Ottoman naval admiral Piri Reis, who was born the affairs of Muslims. The Qur’an, in Chapter al-Idrisi. In the mid-12th century, King Roger ii commissioned in 1470 and died in 1554. The subject of many controversial stud- 10, Verse 5, states that time should be reckoned al-Idrisi to produce an illustrated geography of the world called ies, the Piri Reis map shows astonishingly accurate coastlines not by the Moon. Existing calendars of the era were Kitab nuzhat al-mushtaq fi’kh tiraq al-afaq (The book of only for Central and South America but also Antarctica. identified with other religions and cultures. He pleasant journeys into faraway lands). The 70 individual maps December depicts Katip Çelebi’s map of Japan, which effec- therefore decided to create a calendar specifically that accompany the copies of al-Idrisi’s manuscript are extremely tively signals the close of Islamic cartographic originality, as for the Muslim community. It would be lunar, and detailed representa- copies and techniques of European atlases take center stage in it would have 12 months, each with 29 or 30 days. tions of the world, well the field. While translating Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas Minor This gives the lunar year 354 days, 11 days fewer Nasuh’s cartographically ahead of their time. Not into Ottoman Turkish in 1653–1655, Çelebi also made copies than the solar year. ‘Umar chose as the epoch for illustrated histories only are the al-Idrisi of Mercator’s maps, which he labeled in Ottoman Turkish. the new Muslim calendar the Hijra, the emigration could be described as maps ranked among There is yet one distinctively Islamic cartographic-copying of the Prophet Muhammad and 70 Muslims from Makkah to Madinah, where Muslims first attained the first attempt at 3D. the most mimetic tradition that continues even into the modern era: the depic- world maps of the later tion, in cartographic forms, of the holy cities of Makkah and religious and political autonomy. The Hijra thus occurred on 1 Muharram of the year 1 according to Middle Ages, but they Madinah, as shown in July’s Hajj certificate scroll map. Often the Islamic calendar. This date corresponds to July also include regional maps that show an astounding under- elaborately illuminated in gold, these scrolls certify the hold- 16, 622 CE, on the Gregorian calendar. Today in the standing of topography for the 13th century. er’s completion of Hajj, or pilgrimage. West, it is customary, when writing hijri dates, to April takes us to Inner Asia, to the start of Turkic influences, Together, all of the maps produced over this unfathomably use the abbreviation AH, which stands for the Latin with a rare and very early map from the late-11th-century ce long era share one thing in common: They were made on anno hegirae, “year of the Hijra.” Because the Arabic-Turkic dictionary Diwan Lughat al-turk (Compendium the basis of sketches, accounts and myths; views from hills, Islamic lunar calendar is 11 days shorter than the of the Turkic Dialects).

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